FastForward Planning™ at Tyndale

Need: Tyndale House is a Christian publisher serving the CBA, ABA, and general trade markets. They had experienced steady, incremental growth for a decade with an ongoing stream of quality books and related products. The sudden popularity of the Left Behind series caught them by surprise. For two years they scrambled to hold on while this one series quadrupled the sales of the entire company. They had to hire 300 more staff and rent warehouse space all over town to keep up with the demand. Tyndale had to make critical decisions about hiring more staff and building more warehouse space. They had no idea how long this phenomenon would continue and needed help planning for a highly uncertain future.

Solution: We responded by guiding their executive team through a FastForward Planning™ experience. FastForward helps leaders plan during times of uncertainty. We started by identifying the driving forces that were impacting the company. Then we surfaced the critical few that were both important and highly uncertain. These became the framework for building four possible futures for Tyndale. We examined the strategy that would work best in each possible future. These scenarios were captured on videotape for later use throughout the organization. Together, they generated several key strategic insights.

Bottom line: Tyndale discovered that Left Behind was “a horse they could ride” and that there were several key moves that they needed to make right away, whatever the future brought. Interestingly, one of their future scenarios envisioned a shift in spiritual interest among the general public as we saw immediately after the September 11th tragedy. You can learn more about the Tyndale story by visiting their website at www.tyndale.com.